Boys’ Adventure Comics and World War Two

Comics, like all mass media, reflected the ideologies of their time and helped to produce and promote ideologies, whether supporting the status quo or rejecting it.

Sean Murray

Comics have come back into mainstream media recently with the release of popular movie franchises based on adaptations of long-running comic book characters. In this series, we examine an aspect of comics that has been largely overlooked by this recent media.

Boys’ Adventure Comics were a hugely popular type of comics in Britain during the 1950s and 60s. With sales of over 500 million a year, they influenced a generation of young readers. The comics featured many types of stories, all based in action and adventure, in a variety of forms including text- and picture-based.

This podcast series features UCD graduate Sean Murray discussing aspects of his 2017 master’s thesis on comics and their relationship to World War II. Here Murray examines how Boys’ Adventure comics in the 1950s and 60s utilized stories set during the war. As is revealed, these stories had an impact on perceptions of the war in Britain, particularly for the generations of children who absorbed these stories.

Episode 1: Boys’ Adventure Comics in 1950s Britain

Episode 2: World War Two and the Comics of the 1950s

Episode 3: Myth, War and the Comics

The series will be released over the coming weeks and will be available for download from iTunes and to stream on Soundcloud.